Free To A Good Home: Beloved 74-year-old Boat

LAKE FRONT

So is it any wonder that it's time for the La Reina to retire gracefully?

The 74-year-old wooden boat whose progress we've followed since it sank in the Ocklawaha River seven months ago won't be repaired by its owners, the Mission Inn Resort.

The resort had operated the historic river yacht as a charter and event boat on Lake Harris since it bought the vessel a decade ago.

Last March, La Reina hooked its hull on a submerged tree limb and sank in a few minutes while trying to snake up the treacherous Ocklawaha for its annual inspection. Mission Inn spent a considerable amount of time and money getting crews to cut their way through the river and coax the boat to Jacksonville, where it could be hauled out of the water and inspected.

The Beucher family, which owns the Mission Inn, felt it was a "stacked deck" against La Reina, which in Spanish means "The Queen," said Bud Beucher, vice president of the resort.

"At this point, we're looking to make a gift of her," he said.

It about killed him to say that.

"It's a personal issue for me. I would sure like to see her saved. I don't want to pull her out of the river with a backhoe."

But even free, the beautiful old yacht with mahogany walls comes with a price. The estimate to fix the damage from sitting under water for six weeks was $350,000.

The Beuchers recently offered La Reina to Lake County groups for historical preservation, but none have the money or the ability to raise that kind of cash.

The family wants to see the yacht go to a group that will preserve it, and the Pride of Palatka seems to be the most likely candidate.

If that happened, the boat would return to where it was built in the 1930s by Noah Tilghman, in a cavernous boathouse on the St. Johns River in Palatka. The keel is 8-by-10-inch heart of pine, and the flat-bottom hull is 2 inches of solid cypress.

Pride of Palatka is a nonprofit group that wants to start a ferry service on the St. Johns between several points in north Florida, including Crescent City, Welaka and the new Dunn's Creek State Park. The nice thing about the Palatka group is that unlike any Lake County organization, it has a nice chubby bank account. About $1 million in grant money from the feds is sitting there.

Mary Lawson Brown is behind the riverboat effort.

She and several other members of the group looked at La Reina in Jacksonville last month, but they haven't yet made a full report.

"It was in better shape than I thought," Lawson Brown said. "I thought everything would be puckered."

A second possibility is that the group would take the yacht and use it as a stationary terminal for some other, as-yet-unidentified boat that would take on passengers.

It may be a while before the Pride of Palatka decides whether La Reina fits in with its plans.

"We've got money and everything, but we want to make sure we have enough to get the proper boat," Lawson Brown said.